Two private hire firms in the same town, both running twelve cars, both on well-known UK dispatch platforms. One pays £61 a month. The other pays £169.
Neither is being ripped off. They are simply being charged by different units — and almost nobody works that out before signing.
Every price in this article was taken from the suppliers’ own published pricing pages in August 2026. Software pricing moves, so check the current figure before you commit; where a supplier does not publish, I have said so rather than guessed.
The meter matters more than the rate
Dispatch suppliers charge on one of two meters: per vehicle or per driver.
That sounds like a detail. It is the single biggest variable in your bill, because the ratio of drivers to vehicles is not 1:1 in most operations. A firm running days and nights on the same cars might have eighteen drivers across twelve vehicles. A weekend-heavy operation might have twice as many drivers as cars. An owner-driver has one of each.
So when you compare a “£15 per vehicle” supplier against a “£2 per driver” supplier, you are not comparing prices at all. You are comparing two different questions. Work out your own driver-to-vehicle ratio first — it decides which model is cheaper before you look at a single feature.
The published numbers, August 2026
CAB-X charges per vehicle, in sterling. Starter is £15 per vehicle per month, covering the dispatch panel, driver app, live GPS tracking and basic reporting. Professional is from £149 a month and includes ten vehicles, with additional vehicles at £10 each. Business is from £199 a month including fifteen vehicles, again £10 per extra, and adds the passenger app, a web booker widget and in-app card payments. Enterprise is quoted individually and aimed at very large multi-depot fleets. Their terms state no setup fees, no long-term contracts, and that you can cancel at any time and keep your data.
TBMS, which is built specifically for UK licensed private hire, charges per driver. Starter is £35 a month for the first five drivers. Growth keeps that £35 base and adds £2 per additional driver per month. Enterprise is £120 a month for unlimited drivers, with all integrations and a dedicated account manager. They also sell website hosting as an add-on at £6.99 a month.
Gazoop charges per driver and prices in US dollars, with three licence tiers: Standard at $14 per driver per month (or $4 weekly), Premium at $18, and Ultimate at $20. Several things sit outside the licence fee and are billed separately — flight tracking and alerts at 20¢ per booking, external bookings at 20–30¢ per booking depending on tier, staff accounts at $14–$20 a month, a dedicated customer app at $750 per app store, and managed support plans from $69 to $1,199 a month.
TaxiCaller publishes per-vehicle pricing in US dollars with a free trial and no binding contract. I could not load their pricing page directly to verify the current figure, so I am not going to quote one — check it yourself before comparing.
The same firm, three very different bills
Take a real shape of business: twelve vehicles, eighteen drivers. At the list prices above:
- CAB-X Professional — £149 for the first ten vehicles, plus two at £10 = £169 a month
- TBMS Growth — £35 for the first five drivers, plus thirteen at £2 = £61 a month
- Gazoop Ultimate — eighteen drivers at $20 = $360 a month, before any per-booking extras
Scale it up to twenty-five vehicles and forty drivers and the shape changes again:
- CAB-X Business — £199 for fifteen vehicles, plus ten at £10 = £299 a month
- TBMS Enterprise — £120 a month, unlimited drivers
- Gazoop Ultimate — forty drivers at $20 = $800 a month, plus extras
And at the small end, four vehicles and five drivers:
- CAB-X Starter — four at £15 = £60 a month
- TBMS Starter — £35 a month, which covers all five drivers
- Gazoop Standard — five at $14 = $70 a month, plus extras
Two things fall out of that. First, per-driver pricing with a low incremental rate gets dramatically cheaper as you grow, while per-vehicle pricing scales roughly linearly. Second, a tiered plan can undercut the simple per-unit rate on the same supplier — twelve vehicles on CAB-X Starter would be £180, so Professional at £169 is both cheaper and has more in it. Suppliers do not always steer you to the cheaper tier. Ask.
One important caveat before you take the cheapest column. These are list prices for different products, not like-for-like. CAB-X Business includes a passenger app and in-app card payments; TBMS Enterprise includes every integration and a named account manager; Gazoop’s cheaper licence fee sits alongside per-booking charges that the others fold in. A £61 bill that makes you buy three things separately is not a £61 bill.
Why two of the biggest names are missing from that list
If you have shopped for UK dispatch software you will have met iCabbi and Autocab. Neither publishes prices. Both route you to a demo first, and iCabbi is widely reported to require customers to sign a non-disclosure agreement covering pricing — meaning existing users are not free to tell you what they pay.
I am not going to pretend that is unusual in enterprise software, because it is not. But it has a practical consequence worth naming: you cannot benchmark a quote you are not allowed to discuss. If you go down that route, get your quote broken into licence, setup, training, support and per-transaction components, and get the renewal uplift in writing. Otherwise year two is a negotiation you have already lost.
Independent estimates put the wider market anywhere from around £50 a month for basic platforms to several thousand for enterprise deployments, with per-driver models commonly in the £5–£20 range. Treat that as a sanity check on a quote, not a target.
The charges that are not on the pricing page
The licence fee is the number you compare. It is rarely the number you pay.
Per-booking fees. This is the one that bites hardest, because it scales with success rather than size. Gazoop’s flight tracking at 20¢ per booking looks trivial until you do a thousand airport jobs a month — at which point one feature costs $200, more than the driver licences on a small fleet. Any charge expressed in pence per booking should be multiplied by your actual monthly volume before you react to it.
Currency. Gazoop and TaxiCaller both price in US dollars. If you are a UK operator, your software cost now moves with the exchange rate and may attract a card issuer’s foreign transaction fee. Over a year that is a real, unbudgeted variance on an otherwise fixed cost.
Setup, training and data migration. CAB-X and TBMS both advertise no setup fee, which is genuinely worth something. Where a supplier does charge, ask what migration actually includes: customers only, or bookings and invoice history too? Moving a customer list is trivial. Moving three years of booking records is not — and if your licence requires you to retain them, you need them somewhere readable.
Support as a product. Gazoop sells managed support as separate plans running from $69 to $1,199 a month, priced by ticket allowance. Read what “support” means in your contract before assuming a human answers at 5am on a Saturday, which is precisely when dispatch software fails in a way you cannot ignore.
Payment processing. Card fees on passenger payments are separate from the software fee, and whether they flow through your own merchant account or the supplier’s determines who controls your cash flow and your chargebacks. I covered why that matters in the buyer’s guide to UK dispatch software.
The only number worth comparing
Headline price per vehicle tells you very little. Cost per booking tells you almost everything.
Take your total monthly software cost — licence, add-ons, support, per-booking fees, the lot — and divide it by the bookings you actually take. A twelve-car firm doing 1,400 jobs a month at £169 is paying about 12p a booking. The same firm at £61 is paying about 4p. On a £30 average fare, both are noise against your driver cost, your fuel and your insurance.
That reframing matters, because operators routinely spend weeks shaving £40 a month off a software bill while losing far more to jobs that were never recorded properly, invoices nobody chased, or a booking form that quietly loses a third of its traffic. If a £100-a-month system recovers two jobs a week that a £40 one drops, the £100 system is free.
What changes when you hit ten vehicles
Here is a cost most pricing comparisons miss entirely, because it is not a software cost at all — it is a licensing one.
Private hire operator licence conditions are set by each council, and some tie the type of system you must run to your fleet size. Leeds, for example, requires newly licensed operators with ten to nineteen vehicles to use an approved computerised system, and those over twenty to run a booking and dispatch system — while a sole operator or a firm with two to nine vehicles may still keep paper records. Some authorities additionally require voice recording of telephone advance bookings.
So growing from nine cars to eleven can change your legal obligations, not just your monthly bill. Budget for it as part of the growth step, and check your own authority’s published conditions rather than assuming Leeds applies to you — they vary considerably. I went through what councils actually require from a booking system in a separate piece on booking records.
What I would actually pay for, at each size
Owner-driver to about five cars. Buy the cheapest thing that captures every booking properly and sends a confirmation. At this size your bottleneck is winning work, not dispatching it. Spend the difference on your website. Per-driver pricing usually wins here because your driver count is low.
Six to fifteen cars. This is where the meter question really bites, and where I would pay for automation over features: reminders before pickup, a payment nudge on unpaid invoices, a review request after a completed job. Those three run without you and pay for the software several times over. If you run shifts, per-driver pricing may cost you more than per-vehicle — do the arithmetic for your own ratio rather than trusting a comparison table.
Fifteen cars and up. Flat unlimited-driver pricing starts to dominate, and the questions shift from price to exit: can you export everything yourself, does the price hold at renewal, and who owns the merchant account. At this size a bad contract costs more than a bad feature set.
Any size, if you are chauffeur or airport-transfer led. Cheapest-per-vehicle is the wrong lens entirely. Pre-booked, account-based work fails on the things a proximity-dispatch tool does badly — flight changes, quoted rates, corporate accounts, the message where the client asked for a child seat. I have written about why generic dispatch tools break executive work, and it is worth reading before you optimise for £15 a car.
For what it is worth, RideDesk, which we build, sits deliberately in that last category rather than competing on price per vehicle with radio-circuit software. Since August 2026 its pricing is published, and it uses a third kind of meter this article has not covered: flat monthly bands by booking volume — free up to 10 transfers a month, then $99 and $199 a month uncapped by drivers or vehicles, with no per-booking fees and no commission (current figures). Read that with the same scepticism as everything above: we price in US dollars, so the currency caveat I raised against Gazoop and TaxiCaller applies to us identically. Invoicing runs through your own Stripe, PayPal or SumUp account, drivers get a private link with nothing to install, and forwarding a job to a partner is a tracked action rather than a WhatsApp message.
Whatever you end up on, do the sum with your own driver count, your own vehicle count and your own monthly bookings before you look at a single feature list. Most operators discover their real decision was made by a ratio they had never bothered to calculate.
